Retail merchandise display space is a scarce and valuable resource. This is especially true of “point of purchase” (POP) space at or near customer checkout stations. Optimal use of display space is a key factor in successful retail merchandising. In particular, it is desirable to maximize the tendency of a display to attract customers' attention to the product, often in the presence of tightly limited space constraints amid cluttered and distracting surroundings. Other goals include minimizing complexity and setup and maintenance effort required, keeping in mind the necessity of relying on busy store personnel whose priorities may lie elsewhere.
Customer attention to a product display may be influenced by a variety of physical considerations, such as, for example, the size of the display, the surface area presented, the orientation of surfaces relative to the customer's line of sight, the geometric design, the colors employed, and the proximity to the customer's position.
In many applications, it is desirable to provide a product display modality that increases the attention-getting display area presented to the customer and better orients it relative to the customer's line of sight, while minimizing the display footprint and eliminating or minimizing required setup and maintenance effort.
Existing merchandise displays commonly entail either extracting individual product packages from a larger box by hand and arranging them on shelves or on hooks, or cutting away part of the larger box and placing the entire box in the display location. The former approach is labor intensive and leaves the door open to disarrangement of merchandise by customers and insufficiently careful placement by employees; the latter tends to limit the visibility of the merchandise and/or packaging.
Among other embodiments and innovations and by way of example only, disclosed herein are merchandise display modules that self-deploy from a compact configuration convenient for shipping and/or storage to an extended or deployed configuration suitable for merchandise display, with minimal or no human intervention required. More generally, in embodiments as disclosed, merchandise displays may thus be provided with movable components that self-deploy to a pre-determined position when removed from a carton or container or otherwise released from constraints against movement.
This deployment may be actuated actively, such as by a motor or solenoid, or passively, such as by a spring. Active actuation is impracticably expensive, complex, and unreliable for typical merchandise display applications. Commonly available passive components are unsatisfactory on several dimensions. Ordinary metal spring materials deform irreversibly if subjected to large strains, such as, for example, bending through a large angle over a short distance. Thus to actuate movement of a component through a large angle it is necessary to resort to configurations such as coil springs so as to distribute the bending strain over much greater length, requiring relatively large and unsightly components and leading to increased manufacturing costs and complexity. Also, display modules may typically remain in shipping cartons for extended periods of time, during which small spring components kept under constant load may lose elasticity and fail to fully self-deploy.
In embodiments as disclosed herein, these disadvantages are overcome by employing actuators taking advantage of the properties of certain shape memory alloy (SMA) materials to provide the high elasticity needed in a component that is simple, compact, and inexpensive to manufacture.
It is well known that SMA materials such as, for example, nitinol, have a property known as “shape memory”, wherein an SMA component can be fabricated to have a thermally-set shape. At lower temperatures, the SMA material can be readily deformed into another shape, but when the SMA material is heated it returns to the thermally-set shape. Although shape memory effects can be exploited to produce movement in an actuator, doing so entails applying heat, introducing undesirable complexity.
However, in addition to their shape memory properties, some SMA materials, when fabricated with the correct alloy composition and employed within the correct temperature range and other conditions as disclosed herein, also exhibit the property of superelasticity. Unlike most commonly used metals, which deform irreversibly if bent beyond a relatively small deflection, superelastic materials can be fabricated that are capable of tolerating very large deformations while retaining the ability to recover their original undeformed shape upon release of the deforming load.
In the context of the merchandise display applications here under consideration, the inventors have found that this increase in elasticity is sufficient to obviate the need for bulky or complicated spring actuators, enabling the production of self-deploying display components using spring actuators of simple design and low cost, and greatly simplifying manufacture of the display modules.